Challenge, Triumph, & Selling a Company During a Pivot
How we sold our dating app MeetMindful amid COVID-19
The End Of An Era
Late into the evening on April 3rd, 2020 — quarantined at home due to COVID-19 — my co-founder and I met on a Zoom call to sell our dating app MeetMindful to Utah-based company Mindful, LLC.
As if it was business as usual, we e-signed the docs in real-time, clinked our glasses at the laptop camera, and took a screenshot to document the moment (ornamented with our latest obsession, Snapchat filters). To wrap up the transaction, we each shared a specific appreciation for one another, a clear display of our shared company cultures.
Just like that, a seven year chapter was closed.
I’m thrilled to announce Wesley Eames and Keith Gruen as the new owners of MeetMindful, bringing it into its next chapter. Co-founder Wesley Eames shares: “The MeetMindful community has become invaluable to thousands of individuals, and we look forward to taking on an active role in fulfilling its mission as the new owners. We’re eager to invest our time, resources, and energy into this incredible online community and are committed to help even more people build deeper and more meaningful relationships.”
We Built This City On Like-Minded Love
My co-founder, Adam Taylor, and I started MeetMindful in 2014 with a mission to help people find more meaningful connections every day. It was built for a community we know well: people who value personal development, wellness, spirituality, meditation, and mindfulness — a rapidly expanding market with a strong need for like-minded connections, especially romantic.
For those of you who remember the “spiritual but not religious” box on Match.com, you know what I’m talking about. MeetMindful helps these like-minded people find love.
Our users want to find a like-minded partner, somebody with whom they can authentically connect and grow. Over the years, many users have also wanted to use MeetMindful to meet like-minded friends and feel a deeper sense of connection to community. We’d often talk to our members about how we could help them make other types of connections beyond dating, but knew it was important to focus on doing one thing well first before venturing into other offerings.
So we did that. From 2014 to 2018, MeetMindful grew into the leading dating app for people into mindfulness, spirituality, wellness and personal growth.
And it sure was exciting. For years, users and revenue grew by 5% week over week. Because of the foundation of shared lifestyle and values, our users continually rated their MeetMindful dates and relationships much better than other connections from other apps/sites.
The success stories came pouring in from all over the world, with a resounding “Finally! After years of searching elsewhere, I found my person on MeetMindful.”
As we improved the product and grew market share, every company pitch revolved around our vision of helping people find more meaningful connections every day — starting with dating, and one day expanding beyond dating into other types of connections and relationship building.
We purposefully didn’t define what that expansion looked like until we were ready. We just knew that when it was time, we would one day turn the corner.
The Meeting That Changed It All
Flash forward to the summer of 2018. We’d raised a Series A earlier that year and one of our goals was to start researching ways to expand beyond dating to meet other relationship-building and meaningful connection needs.
I remember sitting in a board meeting that summer as we discussed KPIs and conversion metrics. I took a deep breath and said, “This isn’t what’s keeping me up at night. What’s keeping me up at night is the fact that we have a bigger vision that we haven’t gone after yet. There’s a greater opportunity and I know that we’re the ones to bring it to life.”
Our vision to help people find more meaningful connection every day had become more relevant than ever as we saw daily headlines about loneliness, social disconnection, and social isolation rates at record highs. Something had shifted in the cultural conversation.
As leaders of a consumer tech company, I believe we have a responsibility to take a stand and make products that create true human connection. At the time, I didn’t know exactly how we were going to do it, but we were ready to start the transition and begin exploring.
I walked out of that board meeting not knowing exactly what I had just done. What had I just put into motion? Amidst all the confusion, one thing was clear: it was time to put on our explorer hats.
The Expedition Begins
Over the next few months as we continued to grow and operate MeetMindful, my co-founder Adam and I got to work. After reading countless articles and research on key topics — loneliness, disconnection, and community — we looked up the definition of health.
According to the World Health Organization, health is defined as a “complete balance of mental, physical, and social well-being…[.]”.
I remember sitting in that room, reading that definition. Social well-being…why isn’t anyone talking about that? Both mental and physical health are massive trillion dollar markets. However, the third leg of that stool, just as critical as mental and physical health, is social well-being (or social wellness, as we like to call it). And yet as far as we could see, it was still a giant question mark.
Without a focus on social wellness — that is, our sense of belonging, social connectedness, and strength of relationships — human beings simply cannot thrive and flourish.
Loneliness is a growing health epidemic. Rates have doubled since the 1980s, and now 46% of Americans report feeling lonely all the time. Worse, loneliness has the same impact on mortality as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, making it even more dangerous than obesity.
From that day on, our new North Star became Social Wellness. To help people experience more meaningful connection every day, we committed to build a new category of social wellness products and resources to help people improve their social wellness and live a life of connection and thriving.
Even with a long road ahead, a weight had been lifted. I’ve learned a few key lessons over the past seven years, and one is this:
As an entrepreneur, if you don’t go after your vision, you will always feel misaligned, as if something is missing.
Obviously we had a decision to make. We had our beloved dating product for people to meet over like-minded values of personal development, wellness, mindfulness, and spirituality. At the same time, we had a chance to finally expand into our larger vision and create a product that helps people improve their social wellness, build stronger relationships, and experience more meaningful connection every day.
The North Star of Social Wellness
Internally, we formed two teams: one continued operating MeetMindful, while another worked to rapidly prototype new ideas. That team prototyped and tested four different concepts across multiple social wellness pillars over an eight-week period.
In May 2019, we launched a new beta product called Fabriq (pronounced ‘fabric’). Fabriq’s science-backed tools and resources are the first of their kind designed to help you build better social habits and intentionally invest in more fulfilling connections with the people who matter most. More on that in Part 2 (coming soon).
We split the team’s resources between Fabriq and MeetMindful so that both products could thrive and provide value in the world. No doubt this was a challenge, one that I wouldn’t wish on anyone without ample preparation.
After talking to a number of companies about buying MeetMindful, we swiped right on a group that felt like a perfect match. The team behind Mindful — Wesley Eames and Keith Gruen — has deep roots in the relationship and connection space. We’ve been fortunate to work with them in other capacities over the years, and feel confident they will bring MeetMindful to new heights under their leadership.
Handing Over The Keys
It’s a strange place to be as a founder, handing off your baby after seven years. All the memories merge together — the big wins, the belly laugh moments, the oh-shit-did-that-really-just-happen mistakes, the challenges, all the work we didn’t get to do.
We built a tight family of team members who put their time and energy into making this product a reality. Most of all, MeetMindful has helped over a million people connect with one another, thousands of whom found love and deeply fulfilling relationships.
This transaction gives us the ability to focus 100% on Fabriq moving forward, helping people find deeper social connection and improve the strength of their own social fabric.
In the next decade we predict that social wellness will emerge as the next major category of health and wellness, and that social wellness is the missing link to human thriving and flourishing. At 250,000 connections and counting on Fabriq so far, the cultural changes and social distancing brought on by COVID-19 only help to further our cause.
For any founder who has a bigger vision, let this story be a testament to the power of remaining open to possibility and not holding too tightly to how you think things “should” be. Because you never know what may be around the corner waiting for you.
